When I was first asked to offer student perspectives on teaching in the round, I was reminded of a module I took in the second year of my undergraduate English degree: ‘Literature 1900–present’. Each week, our seminar leader would have us rearrange the room—pushing aside desks and chairs, abandoning the whiteboard, and forming a circle instead. When the weather allowed, we’d relocate to Royal Fort Gardens, gathering around the log circle beneath the trees.
I remember being particularly struck by this move because it was the first time in my degree that I saw my education as a conversation rather than instruction. By simply rearranging the room to place students and the teacher in a circle, the dynamics of what was expected of us as students—and what we, as students, could expect of our teacher— shifted. The first noticeable change was that all barriers of hierarchy immediately dissolved; hiding at the back of the class behind the most confident students at the front was no longer an option. Secondly, the gap between student and teacher closed; we were no longer passive spectators of instruction but active participants in a conversation. Soon, even the shyest voices in the class (of which I was one) began to take part in the discussion, answering questions, and, more importantly, asking questions. There was nowhere to hide because there was no need to hide. Learning in a circle was a subtle but powerful reminder that we were all invited into the conversation, regardless of any preconceived anxieties about confidence, experience, or hierarchy that we carried into the classroom with us.
As students, our orientation in the classroom is typically linear—structured through question-and-answer exchanges with the teacher or discussions in pairs. Learning in the round offers an opportunity to disrupt these familiar patterns. In my Literature 1900–present seminars, learning in a circle fostered a web-like environment where students engaged with one another not through the rigid layout of horizontal desk rows—distinctly separate from the teacher at the front—but through a dynamic tangle of back, forth, left, right, and diagonal conversation. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome, ideas were free to sprawl.
This module was one of the few I’ve ever taken that maintained almost 100% attendance right through to the end of term. Lectures, though on a much larger scale, tell a very different story. In recent years, it’s become increasingly clear that student attendance in lectures is declining, and there seems to be an ongoing competition between attending in person and engaging with the material alone at home.
What students are looking for in their lectures is something different from reading slides or listening without discussion. They’re looking for interaction, peer engagement—they want to feel involved. The in-person lecture needs to offer something so crucial to students, something you can’t get remotely, something worth the cost of travelling to campus or adjusting a shift pattern to attend. Coming to a lecture needs to feel like an event. I think that comes from the interactions between the teachers and students that you just can’t replicate at home. There’s so much to be said for students being in proximity with each other—not the backs-of-heads arrangement typical of an end-on lecture theatre, but a setup that allows for genuine social connection. Teaching in the round opens opportunities for interactive engagement that can generate the kinds of questions, ideas, comments, and knowledge you simply cannot afford to miss.
Finally, we hear time and again that students who don’t feel a sense of learner identity tend to view their university experience as more transactional, rather than intellectually enriching and stimulating. Developing a learner identity comes from a holistic sense of belonging across all areas of university life. Many NSS comments speak to a troubling sense of loneliness, with students seeking social interaction not just in the places we might expect—in their halls or in societies—but also within their academic environments. It comes back to that relational piece: students will get so much more out of their time at Bristol if they feel they belong to something—that they’re active participants in their lectures, not just silent spectators lurking in the back row. The lecture theatre in the round offers an exciting opportunity to create a learning environment that isn’t just academically engaging, but also invites students to feel part of a larger community of learning.
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